Privacy

What we collect

• Pageviews. We run our own cookieless counter. Visitor counts use a salted hash of IP and browser that rotates every day — we can tell two views apart within a day, but cannot recognize you tomorrow, and no raw IP is stored. For referrers we keep the external site's hostname only (e.g. "google.com"), never the full URL.
• Searches that find nothing. To decide which universities to add next, we log search queries that returned zero results — the query text alone, with no identifier of any kind attached.
• University requests. If you use the "don't see your university?" form, we store the university name you typed. The daily-rotating hash above is used only to cap submissions per day.
• Advisor-match questionnaires. Answers are stored anonymously to measure whether matching works. They carry no identifier and cannot be tied to a person. The matching endpoint is rate-limited by a salted IP hash kept in a separate table, deliberately unlinkable to questionnaire content.

What we don't do

• No accounts, no sign-in, no email collection.
• No third-party analytics, ad networks, or tracking pixels.
• No cookies for tracking. (Your light/dark theme choice is saved in your own browser's local storage and never sent to us.)
• No selling or sharing of data with anyone.

Researcher profiles

Profiles are generated from public scholarly records (OpenAlex) and show only facts derivable from them — publications, topics, activity. We never infer or display personal attributes. If a profile concerns you, you can have it corrected by emailing claims@labcompass.app.

Infrastructure

The site is hosted on Vercel with the database on Neon; both process requests on our behalf as ordinary hosting providers. Questions: claims@labcompass.app.